Locus Responds to Tilton Departure

While we don’t usually discuss the end of a contract relationship online, we do want to clarify something about the recent statement made by a freelance reviewer and her relationship with Locus. Lois Tilton wrote: “Without consulting or informing me, they had begun deleting material they considered negative from my reviews. To me, this is censorship and completely unacceptable.” This has been interpreted incorrectly to mean that Locus was making editorial changes to Lois’s columns without her consent.

To clarify, Locus made a decision this month to change how editing future online review columns was to be managed — folding the online columns in to the existing Locus editorial stream and applying the same standard to online reviews as the magazine.

Locus publishes both positive and negative reviews and, we hope, encourages a robust conversation about the works being discussed. When Lois was told about the editorial process being applied to the website, she opted to resign. None of her columns affected by this decision have been posted online, and she was paid for the work even though it will not be published.

We are sorry to see this relationship come to end after 205 columns. We wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors.

I missed reading this and the previous post at the time, so let me say now that I did not interpret Lois’s statement as meaning that Locus had been going back over already-published columns and cutting parts out. I read it as meaning a policy for new reviews whereby she’d submit a new column and only find out when it was published what they decided to delete without her agreement, which apparently is what was meant.